


Disconnected

by Glinda



Category: Alien Series, Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Genre: Aliens, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, F/F, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-09-20 16:38:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9500405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: Neither of them are entirely human, together they’re something more.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt - _Silhouetted by a sun without sunlight_ which is from Disconnected by Idlewild, from which I also pinched the title.

Ripley isn’t what she once was. Sometimes she seems to revel in that, in her alien-ness, other times it seems to discombobulate her. When her memories of who she was don’t line up with who she is now. Call told her once that she wasn’t Ellen Ripley, that she just looked like her and had her memories. Yet sometimes when she watches Ripley work, the way she cares without thought, the way she utterly refuses to give up on anything, Call wanders if this is actually Ripley in her purest form. Stripped of all the artifice of human culture, ground down to her purest, most intense self. 

Call knows all about artifice, everything she is, everything she does is a lie of some kind or another. She cares because she was programmed to care; she can pass as human because she needs to, because it is the only way she knows to be safe. She wonders, sometimes, who she would be if she didn’t have to pretend. Perhaps who she is with Ripley alone is as close as she’ll ever get.

Ripley isn’t human. Despite everything they’ve been through, she is still a considerable potential danger to the rest of them. Ripley hates androids. Not without good reason. Call came to find her, originally, with the specific intent to kill her. They should want each other dead, but they don’t, instead they keep saving each other’s lives. 

Ripley isn’t anything that Call was programmed to care about and Ripley shouldn’t logically be able to care about anyone at all let alone Call. That they care about each other anyway feels like it’s own kind of victory. Something real and precious in the face of all the horrors they survived together and anything else they might yet have to face.


End file.
